grateful

Sometimes, when my heart and head are both in the right place, I can really feel David’s prayer in 2 Samuel 7.

This was a time when David wanted to build a temple for God, but Nathan the prophet returns with word from the Lord that this task was not for David. However, David’s family, intended for a key role in God’s redemptive plan, would see the job done. And David prayed.

2 Samuel 7:18-19: “Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said:
‘Who am I, Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? And as if this were not enough in your sight, Sovereign Lord, you have also spoken about the future of the house of your servant—and this decree, Sovereign Lord, is for a mere human!’”

I often feel that way. Who am I, that God would covenant with me? Who am I to be one of the elect? What do I have that God can possibly need or want? What do I offer that thousands of others couldn’t do better?

There’s nothing that makes me preferable to God over the drug dealers and despots and other depraved people that he leaves to his judgment. There’s nothing that makes me a better choice than the dads and moms and mechanics and doctors and all the other normal people who live their lives without God. But he draws me to himself, so that I can know what love truly is. He rains his providence on me, so that I can feel the amazing security of an existence controlled and directed by him. He opens my eyes to the hurting and needy and helps me feel his great compassion for them, so that I can live an exciting, purposeful life serving his kingdom. All my good emotions of gratitude and safety and joy and wonder come from this incomprehensible relationship that he initiated, that he desires to have with me.

Who am I indeed? And, like David, he has a promise and a plan for the future of me and my God-fearing family, rooms in a mansion and eternity spent with him. The greatest reason for gratitude of them all! All, in David’s words, for a mere human.

God is so good to me, for reasons I don’t understand. I also don’t understand, in the light of this great truth, why I live so many days in the gloom of my own doubts and misdirected longings? Great is his faithfulness to me!